Elle Nash is a British-American author, editor and researcher. Her work often centres cross-genre, underrepresented, & working-class narratives she feels are vital to storytelling. Her most recent novel, Deliver Me, is a "darkly vivid examination of faith, obsession, and alienation" and was nominated for Fiction Book of the Year by the Saltire Society.
Nash’s debut, Animals Eat Each Other (2018), was featured in O – The Oprah Magazine and called a “complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire” by Publishers Weekly. She is also the author of the short story collection Nudes (2021) and the novella Gag Reflex (2022), which experiments with narrative through the early internet and LiveJournal entries. Her work has appeared in Guernica, BOMB, Literary Hub, Cosmopolitan, MsLexia, The Spectator, Columbia Journal, Southwest Review, New York Tyrant and more.
As an editor at The Creative Independent, Nash has interviewed literary and cultural icons such as Sasha Grey, Gordon Lish, Atticus Lish, and Eugene Marten, as well as Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis. Since 2014 she has served as a fiction editor for various magazines and co-founded the now-shuttered Witch Craft Magazine.
Based in Glasgow, Scotland, Nash is pursuing a PhD in creative writing and actively mentoring, editing, and working with writers on their paths to publication, many of whom have successfully found representation, been long-listed for awards, and published at houses such as Bloomsbury, 404 Ink, Apocalypse Party, Crooked Lane Books, and Verso Books.
“Elle Nash writes like she climbed out of a black hole simply to invent the knife.”
—The Observer
'To read the work of Elle Nash is to be restored to faith in the wildness, wetness, and visceral power of contemporary American fiction….Get saved'
- Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed and Death Valley
'A horror with heart... There is an emotional depth to Nash's novel that does not take away from, but rather adds to, the horror that lies at its centre'
- Dazed
'Deliver Me is pure jaw-dropping horror while also serving up a piercing insight into the control of women's bodies and the expectations placed upon them…Nash's ending is one you will never forget'
- Stylist
'A creepy and unsettling body of horror. The story is ominous, tragic and unlike anything else I've ever read. Three of my friends and I all read this on a trip to France last year; none of us could put it down. Ideal for fans of Margaret Atwood, Otessa Moshfegh and Emma Cline'
- Newsweek
Longlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year 2024
From the author of Nudes and Animals Eat Each Other comes an unsettling story of motherhood, manipulation and murder.
At a meatpacking facility in Missouri, Dee-Dee and her coworkers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.
The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee's more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term.
Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges her to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend, Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother and boyfriend's newfound attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete.
When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither another miscarriage nor Sloane's own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby's arrival.